The idea of race in early 20th Century South Africa: Some preliminary thoughts
Date
1989-04
Authors
Dubow, Saul
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Abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century racist ideology - whether
explicit or implicit - was a vital part of the ideological repetoire by
which white supremacy legitimated itself to itself. At one level this
contention should not surprise for South Africa is manifestly structured
on racist principles. But, whereas noone could deny the existence of
racism in South Africa, the extent to which racist ideology fashioned
patterns of thought and the ways in which racist ideas articulated with
similar trends overseas, is barely understood. I would suggest that this
gap in our knowledge is not entirely an accident. In Europe and America
the reality of Nazism alerted people in a terrifying way to the
consequences of explicit racism. As a result there now exists a sort of
collective amnesia about pre-war intellectual and political traditions of
racist thought outside of Nazi Germany - traditions which were not only
widely pervasive, but also attained a significant degree of respectability.
So fundamental has the shift in intellectual attitudes to race been over
the past three or four decades, we almost lack the categories by which
to understand the pre-war racial mind-set. In recent years this problem
has begun to be addressed in a number of important works dealing with
the general topic of Social Darwinism. Yet, even heret a comforting and
comfortable attempt to distance approved intellectual traditions from
tainted ones is evident. For example, racist science is often referred to
dismissively as 'pseudo science'. The difficulty with such an approach is
that it begs fundamental questions about the very nature of science for,
by implication, the suggestion is that pseudo science can be easily
separated from true or objective science. Moreover, to dismiss racial
science as bogus seems to suggest that it was peripheral to mainstream
scientific investigation, thereby ignoring the extent to which respected
scientists participated in its development. Many of the writers who
devoted considerable research to the investigation of racial differences
were prominent intellectuals who conformed to recognised standards of
academic rigour; their arguments are logically constructed and copiously
footnoted so that on formal grounds at least there is not always reason
to dismiss them as charlatans - however wrong their premises or
conclusions may be.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented April, 1989
Keywords
Racism. South Africa. History. 20th century